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Nathan Royce
Nathan Alexander Royce (born May 8, 2179, died November 21, 2257) was the greatest Grand Wizard in the history of the Klansmen Confederacy and a hero. A young wanderer who ventured across and around the Gulf of Mexico, Royce later returned and formed the Klansmen Confederacy into the nation-state it is today. Even after his death in 2257, his legacy is felt in the Klansmen Confederacy's strong position in Mississippi and its impact on other communities. However, Royce might not be as pleased with his creation as many would think. Biography Early Life Nathan Alexander Royce was the first child and eldest son born to Grand Titan Lewis Morgan Royce and Mary Ruth Royce outside the town of Barnett in the Klansmen Confederacy on May 8, 2179. The Royces were a well-to-do farming family and a pillar in the local community. Nathan was a strong baby that grew into a strong toddler and always played outside and loved watching his father work in the fields or hunt. On Nathan's seventh birthday, he received two gifts: he was allowed to go to the schoolhouse in town after planting season to learn more than his letters, and he was given his first gun. Nathan took to both immediately. However, over time, he learned that he wasn't such a good shot and school became a bore. Too much about racial purity and war and too little of actual substance. Nathan had plenty of friends but didn't feel any real connection to any of them. That made him worried about the future, when he would have to find someone to marry. At thirteen, Nathan's first life changing experience came. On the night of August 19, 2192, Nathan was hunting alone for only the second or third time when he heard a noise. Thinking it was a deer, Nathan leveled his hunting rifle and squinted at where the noise came from. There he saw the glow of a campfire. Coming closer, Nathan saw a cart with with a Brahmin hitched to it. Around the campfire were several people, two were black and one was a ghoul, a sight Nathan had never seen before. At first, Nathan felt obligated to shoot them or at least fire off a warning shot. They're intruders and undesirables. It's my job as a man now to defend- But his curiosity was also strong. These people were from the outside and probably knew a lot more than he did. So, in a break neck decision, Nathan walked out of the brush and said hello. The people gathered round the campfire seemed rather nonplussed about Nathan's greeting and also said hello. Then, Nathan asked who they were and why they were there in a slightly aggressive tone. The people responded, saying that they were a new caravan company that was crossing through these parts for the first time. It was then that they invited him to sit at their campfire. Nathan was tentative at first, staring at the ghoul and the two blacks for an uncomfortably long time, but accepted their offer. Sitting down, Nathan was asked who he was and where he came from. Nathan told them plainly who he was: a young white hunter who lived outside of Barnett. He also told his future plans. "Someday, I wanna take over the farm from Pa and maybe have a few kids. Join the Klan. You know, life." The caravaners seemed to respect Nathan's simple ambition, even becoming a Klansmen (which they had no concept of). They themselves then began to tell their own stories, of faraway lands and forgotten places. Nathan was enthralled by descriptions of the excesses of The Big Easy, the blood drenched battlefields of the Corpse Coast, the sunken treasure of Florida, and even of the exotics of Mexico. The young boy bathed himself in this newfound knowledge, this knowledge of an outside that had begun to fascinate him. The caravaners also let Nathan have some of their food. The Cram was honestly disgusting, but these things called Sugar Bombs were just wonderful. Soon, Nathan ate so many Sugar Bombs that he felt sick and had to go home. Wishing the caravaners well, Nathan headed back and went to bed. The next day, Nathan was woken up by his younger brother, who told him "there's a hangun goin on!" Intrigued, Nathan ran after his brother into the woods to see who was being hung. After running for a while, Nathan and his brother came upon a group of uniformed Klansmen (including Nathan's father) gathered underneath an oak tree. And swaying from the tree's branches were the caravaners he had met only a few hours before, all hung. It was then that Nathan realized he had to leave Barnett. He wanted to see the outside world for himself. Nathan decided to make a goal, so he promised to himself that he would leave home the day he turned sixteen. Nathan later told his parents. His father was at first furious that his firstborn son wanted to leave but in time, grew to accept that his son wanted to explore the wide world. And after all, he had other children. Nathan's mother also accepted his decision with as much grace as she could muster. For the next few years, Nathan worked hard on the farm and in school. Pushed out of school at fifteen, like most people, Nathan began making plans for leaving, consulting maps and trying to remember what the caravaners told him about the Gulf of Mexico. Deciding against journeying to Mexico, Nathan set the more realistic but still faraway goal of seeking his fortunes in the Big Easy, at the mouth of the Mississippi River. All he needed to do was catch a raft at Natchez and float south down the river. If only it was that easy... Road to the Big Easy May 7, 2195 had come. Nathan, now sixteen, was ready to leave. However, his father wanted him to do one last thing before leaving: Nathan had to officially join the Klan. That night, the initiation ceremony took place. Nathan mechanically made the pledge to uphold the purity of the white race and to fight oppression, evil, and the Jewish world conspiracy. A Klan patch was sown onto the wrist of Nathan's shirt to tell the world who he was. The next morning was Nathan's birthday and the day he would leave. And he did. Taking only a sack of some of his possessions (one shirt with the Klan patch and one without, some caps, and a few baubles to remember home by), the clothes on his back, and the hunting rifle his father had given to him on his thirteenth birthday, Nathan began his long walk to Natchez to catch a raft down to the Big Easy. On only the third day after Nathan left, he was almost ambushed by raiders but managed to lose them in the woods and fled west and continued on to Natchez. Luckily for him, there were no more raider attacks after that. Nathan's journey to Natchez ended in about a week later. Natchez was larger than any town Nathan had even seen. There were many people there and not all of them were white. The rafters from the river were of all colors and in the town, there were even some some robots, mostly protectrons with one or two sentry bots. Nathan was already amazed at what he had seen. However, that did not phase him from trying to catch a boat down to the Big Easy. At first, many rafters were reluctant to take a Klan boy down the river, as no Klansmen ever wanted to leave the town with a rafter. But after several sessions of begging and pleading, a raft captain by the name of Bubba Stump decided to offer Nathan a lift to the Big Easy in exchange for Nathan's hunting rifle, which was actually quite valuable because it was heavily modified. At first, Nathan was reluctant, since losing his weapon meant losing his independence as well as a link to his family. But after much bickering, Nathan relented and handed over his weapon in exchange for a ride to the Big Easy. At least the whole crew is white. The boatride to the Big Easy was long but certainly not boring. The Mississippi River was haunt common for pirates, mutants, and worst things. On June 14, 2195, Bubba Stump and many other rafters near him were attacked by Brownwater pirates, predecessors of the Court of the Bayou. The pirates, using small canoes so as to make less noise, slipped onto Stump's large raft with the intent of hijacking it and taking it. Stump had other ideas. Coming out of his bunk guns blazing, Stump shot some of the pirates but ran out of bullets and was cornered by one wielding a knife. Suddenly, a gunshot rang out and the pirate fell to the ground. Behind him stood Nathan, holding his father's rifle that he had picked up. Stump smiled. "You can keep the rifle. Free of charge." The rest of the voyage was less dangerous but no less exciting. On both shores of the Mississippi, Nathan saw many peculiar things, from Swampers to seeing his very first Deathclaw devour those Swampers. As Bubba Stump's raft drifted further south, the sights became more weird for Nathan now that they had passed beyond Klan territory. I could swear I saw that white woman and that black man on shore holding hands. Big Trouble in the Big Easy On June 21, 2195, Stump's raft finally reached the Big Easy, a bit behind schedule. They dropped off at Vieux Carré. There Nathan, instead of staying, gave Stump a very curt goodbye, gave him a few caps for his troubles, and jumped ship. Nathan had finally arrived in the city. The culture shock he got after that was tremendous. Scantily clad women paraded around exposing themselves, voodoo enthusiasts spouted out curses, and in his first five minutes in Vieux Carré, Nathan even saw a man get murdered over a sweet roll. And blacks and ghouls EVERYWHERE. This was the Big Easy before the Royaume, before even Obed Narcisse, when the bosses ruled and no one was safe. Nathan, knowing very little about this place, decided to find lodging someplace so he could have someplace to sleep beside the street. Going to a nearby hostel named the High Joint, Nathan was once again shocked at meeting the receptionist, an elderly male to female transvestite. After stuttering out his name and buying a small room with a cot, the woman politely offered to walk Nathan to his room, which he accepted out of courtesy. When he got to his room, Nathan instantly fell onto his cot, expecting to go to sleep instantly. Instead, he was kept awake by a loud thumping and moaning on the other side of one of his walls. Nathan had had the misfortune (or did he) of picking a room right next to the Rad Queen brothel and would be kept awake for rest of the night listening to "the awful, sinful noises of whores and harlots". Raised in the Klansmen Confederacy, Nathan had never been exposed to any of this and had striven to be a exemplar "good boy" his whole life. That night, he considered going home. But after much thought, Nathan refused to give up. But I can't just live here for very long on caps I have. I need to find a job. Back home in Barnett, most everyone was farmers except for a few of the townsfolk and almost no one dealt in caps, mostly in barter. Nathan did not know where to start looking. Walking around the town with his rifle on his hip and his Klan emblem on his arm, Nathan caused much unease among the residents of the Big Easy, who had heard stories of those xenophobic, white trash Klansmen who lived up the river. No better than swampfolk. To look for work, Nathan went to a social club, then a restaurant, and even a port warehouse. No luck. This continued on for next two months. Nathan did manage to scrape together a few caps from odd work, mostly shoveling dirt for the Architects to strengthen levies. Good honest work, but not reliable. As he stayed in the Big Easy longer, Nathan began to "lose his shell", so to speak. He no longer cringed when he talked to Linda, the receptionist who always wished him hello in the morning after breakfast. Nathan didn't avert his eyes when ghouls and blacks passed him on the street. He even began to fall to sleep at night listening the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of the prostitutes next door (not by choice of course). Nathan was accepting the Big Easy, that is until that one damned day. It was the morning of August 16, 2195. Nathan was eating breakfast in the dining room of the High End hostel when an attractive woman approached him. She asked him if he was looking for reliable work. Nathan replied that, yes, he had been looking for good work for a long time. The women seemed almost happy at that and offered Nathan "a good, well paying job for men in your position." Nathan snapped it up instantly, asking where it was. The woman stood up and indicated that they leave the hostel. Going outside, the woman simply turned left and made to go into the Rad Queen Brothel. Nathan, confused, asked why she was going into the brothel and not leading him to where he would work. And then he realized what she was indicating. Nathan was not an unattractive man and desperate, but he was not about to stoop to that level. As the woman returned outside to ask why he did not follow her in, an unmeasurable rage began to build up in Nathan. She tried to make a whore out of me. SHE TRIED TO MAKE A WHORE OUT OF ME! And with that, Nathan lifted his rifle from his hip and opened fire on the woman in the door. The shot missed and hit the side of the doorway, but it made the woman scamper inside. It also attracted the attention of the people on the street, who saw a man who just opened up fire on the entrance of a whorehouse. Something you might see every other day in the Big Easy. But for Nathan, that was the breaking point. He didn't belong in the Big Easy, it was too insular, too large. Nathan worried that if he stayed in the Big Easy for much longer, it would swallow him up. Right then, he had two options: return home with little to nothing to show for it or put it all in and go farther, into the Gulf of Mexico. Nathan wasn't returning home anytime soon. Also, the Madame next door might try to kill him now. It took a few days to prepare but by August 20, 2195, Nathan was ready to try to snag another ship to someplace across the Gulf. Luckily for Nathan, this time his search was much shorter. Hugh Rutherford, captain of the (former oil) tanker Inferno, needed a new crew. His old one had been lost in an attack made during a delivery to Waldock Plaza to the Monarch's Guards to aid in their war for Mobile. The Monarch's Guards delivery contracts were very lucrative, so Captain Rutherford wanted to go back to deliver more goods, with a full crew for protection. That's were Nathan came in. Scouting for potential candidates for his crew, Rutherford saw a young man wandering about the docks looking at the ships He walked up to Nathan and extended his hand, introducing himself as Captain Hugh Rutherford, captain of the Inferno. Rutherford then asked if Nathan needed a job. Nathan, cautious after his last encounter, asked what kind of work he would doing. Rutherford, a honest man if not a nice one, admitted that they would be sailing into an active war zone and there would peril and danger involved in their journey. Not to Rutherford's surprise, that made Nathan agree right away to join the crew. Either a Roughneck gorebag or a Mobile Ranger bodybag. Poor kid. Life on the Inferno Coming aboard the Inferno, Nathan was introduced to the crew. They were a green bunch, and many, like Nathan, were just earning their sea-legs. Also, the crew was diverse, with ghouls, swampers, nocturnals, badlanders, and people of all races represented. Nathan was polite to them but was confused that he was not met well. Southern prettyboy. This made Nathan very angry at first, but it turned out that all the crew treated each other that way. Nathan's racist attitudes shone through, but no one cared. He was tough, and nobody was about to mess with him. For the next three years, the Inferno ferried goods to Waldock Plaza and the caps kept rolling. However, by 2198, the situation in Waldock Plaza was becoming even more unstable and the Inferno stopped going to Mobile. They needed new sources of income. Beyond the Gulf Jackpot A Returning Dragon The Klan's Reconstruction The River Nation The Seeds of Ignorance Last Years Personality As a boy, Royce was often hotheaded and violent, but also very curious, both about the outside world and how things worked. As he began to get older, Clark began to be able to control his anger and grew more intelligent and well read, reading or hunting when he wasn't doing his administrative duties. Royce had few friends in life, but those he were very close. Appearance With dark hair and dark eyes, Nathan Royce was seen as pretty attractive in his day. As he aged, he grew a beard and became rather gaunt. From then on, he aged rather gracefully. Royce preferred a pre-War suit to a hunting vest. Equipment When Royce was a young man, he often carried his modified hunting rifle around to fight. But later in life, he rarely needed to carry around weapons as he was so well protected. Quotes By About